Berlin 1961

by Frederick Kempe

  Given the unprecedented media demand to attend, Kennedy staged the gathering in the newly built State Department auditorium, a cavernous amphitheater that the New York Times called “as warm as an execution chamber,” with its deep well between the president’s raised podium and the reporters. He saved the news from Moscow for the last of three prepared announcements. The Times would report the next day that a low whistle of astonishment rose from the room when Kennedy said two RB-47 fliers, who had been imprisoned and interrogated for six months, already were en route home from Moscow by air.

  Kennedy lied that he had promised nothing in return to Khrushchev for the airmen’s release. The truth was that he had agreed to Khrushchev’s demand to extend the ban on spy flights over Soviet territory and, once the airmen landed, to keep them away from the media. Kennedy radiated calm self-satisfaction. His first public encounter with the Soviets had ended well. His statement contained much the same language he had cabled to Khrushchev: “The United States Government was gratified by this decision of the Soviet Union and considers that this action of the Soviet Government removes a serious obstacle to improvement of Soviet-American relations.”

  But among friends and advisers, Kennedy was growing so fixated on the January 6 Khrushchev speech that he would read loudly and frequently from a translated version he carried around with him—at Cabinet meetings, at dinners, and in casual conversations—always requesting comments afterward. Thompson had advised Kennedy to distribute the speech to his top people, and Kennedy did so, instructing them to “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” Khrushchev’s message.

  “You’ve got to understand it,” he would say time and again, “and so does everybody else around here. This is our clue to the Soviet Union.”

  The text spoke of Kremlin support for “wars of liberation or popular uprisings…of colonial peoples against their oppressors across the developing world.” It declared that the Third World was rising in revolution and that imperialism was weakening in a “general crisis of capitalism.” In one of the lines Kennedy most liked to quote, Khrushchev said, “We will beat the United States with small wars of liberation. We will nibble them to exhaustion all over the globe, in South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.” Referring to Berlin, Khrushchev promised he would “eradicate this splinter from the heart of Europe.”

  With its timing just ahead of his inauguration, Kennedy falsely concluded that Khrushchev’s policy shift was designed specifically to test him and thus required a response. Thompson had fed that thinking in his advice to the president on how to handle potential media questions. “Solely from a tactical point toward the Soviet Union,” Thompson had said, “it might be advantageous for the President to take the line that he cannot understand why a man who professes to wish to negotiate with us publishes a few days before his inauguration what amounts to a declaration of Cold War and determination to bring about the downfall of the American system.”

  It was true enough that the Soviets and Chinese had agreed on a more active and militant policy toward the developing world. Then Secretary of State Christian A. Herter had told President Eisenhower that the communist gathering sounded “a number of danger signals which the West would do well to heed, such as a call for the strengthening of the might and defense capability of the entire socialist camp by every means.” Herter, however, dismissed the ritual call for a continuation and intensification of the Cold War as “nothing new.”

  Eisenhower had heard so much similar bluster from Khrushchev during his presidency that he had shrugged off this latest version. Lacking this experience and overly confident in his own instincts, Kennedy magnified what Eisenhower had dismissed. He thus overlooked the most important point of the communist gathering, and one that would have been far more helpful to understanding Khrushchev’s predicament than his rhetoric. Herter had told Eisenhower that what was most significant was the unprecedented measure of success the Chinese had achieved in challenging Soviet leadership of world communism—despite four months of Moscow’s lobbying to contain Mao’s views.

  Kennedy’s first miscue in office regarding the Soviets had several sources. Thompson’s cable had played a role. Kennedy was also drawn instinctively to a more hawkish approach to the Soviets due to the popularity of such a course among American voters, his father’s anticommunist influence, and his search for a rallying cause around a presidency he had promised would be “a time for greatness.” His personal take on history had also played a role. His senior honors thesis at Harvard, published in July 1940, had been about British appeasement of the Nazis at Munich. Playing on his hero Churchill’s book While England Slept, he had called it Why England Slept.

  Kennedy would not be caught napping.

  The president was seeking a great challenge, and Khrushchev seemed to be providing it. His administration had not formally reviewed its policy toward the Kremlin nor held a major policy meeting on how to deal with Khrushchev. Despite that, Kennedy was sharply altering course from his inaugural speech’s studied ambiguity toward the Soviets ten days earlier to the drafting of one of the most apocalyptic State of the Union messages ever delivered by an American president.

  Kennedy began by listing all the U.S. domestic challenges, from seven months of recession to nine years of falling farm income. “But all these problems pale when placed beside those which confront us around the world.” Reading language he had scribbled himself onto a final draft, he said: “Each day, the crises multiply. Each day, their solution grows more difficult. Each day, we draw nearer the hour of maximum danger. I feel I must inform the Congress that our analyses over the last ten days make it clear that, in each of the principal areas of the crisis, the tide of events has been running out—and time has not been our friend.”

  Though new intelligence provided him during those intervening ten days had shown him that China and the Soviet Union were increasingly at loggerheads, he insisted, based on the January 6 speech, that both “had forcefully restated only a short time ago” their ambitions for “world domination.”

  He asked Defense Secretary Robert McNamara “to reappraise our entire defense strategy.”

  Kennedy could not have more obviously linked himself rhetorically to his heroes Churchill and Lincoln in this perceived hour of danger. Churchill had said, “Sure I am of this, that you only have to endure to conquer.” Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address had framed the Civil War as one that was testing whether “a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…can long endure.”

  Placing himself directly in the same crosshairs of history, Kennedy told the Congress and the nation: “Before my term has ended, we shall have to test anew whether a nation organized and governed such as ours can endure.”

  It was memorable rhetoric based on a false understanding.

  THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW

  MONDAY, JANUARY 30, 1961

  Khrushchev was still waiting for an answer to his multiple pleas for an early summit with Kennedy when the president’s State of the Union address delivered him the first of several perceived indignities. Two days later, Khrushchev suffered what he considered the further humiliation of watching Kennedy’s America test-launch its first Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile.

  Four days after that, McNamara shamed Khrushchev again—while at the same time embarrassing the White House—by dismissing as “folly,” during a Pentagon press briefing, Khrushchev’s declaration that he was expanding his missile superiority against the U.S. In both missile technology and overall striking potential, the U.S. still enjoyed a considerable edge. McNamara said the two countries had about the same number of missiles in the field, and though he didn’t mention the U.S. superiority of 6,000 warheads to about 300 for the Soviets, he nevertheless had publicly called Khrushchev’s bluff.

  After his failed negotiation track with Eisenhower in 1960, Khrushchev had taken significant political risk in openly praising Kennedy’s election, freeing the airmen, offering other gestures,
and reaching out to the new president for an early summit. Kennedy’s dismissive response, his ICBM test launch, and McNamara’s statement reinforced the charges of Khrushchev’s enemies that he was naive about American intentions.

  On February 11, Khrushchev returned earlier than scheduled from a trip to Soviet farming regions for an emergency Presidium meeting, where his rivals called for a policy shift to address what they regarded as new American militancy.

  The Soviet leader had to rethink his approach. He had failed in his desire to meet with Kennedy before the new president could establish his course toward Moscow. The Soviet leader could not afford to appear weak after Kennedy’s startling State of the Union. Khrushchev immediately altered his tone toward Kennedy and his administration, replacing it with aggressive talk about Soviet nuclear capabilities. The Soviet media shifted course as well.

  The Kennedy-Khrushchev honeymoon had ended before it had begun. Misunderstandings were souring the relationship between the world’s two most powerful men before Kennedy had even chaired his first meeting on Soviet policy.

  CABINET ROOM, THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1961

  Twelve days after his State of the Union, Kennedy called together his top Soviet experts for the first time to lay the groundwork for administration policy. He had placed the horse firmly behind the cart.

  He would not be the first or last newly elected U.S. president to be forced through a speaking schedule to set a policy direction before a formal policy review. Though the administration was only twenty days old, those who attended the meeting—representing both a tougher and more accommodating policy toward Moscow—realized Khrushchev’s early gestures and Kennedy’s tough response had already set a lurching train in motion that they now hoped to steer.

  The long-awaited meeting would provide insight into both Kennedy’s hunger for knowledge and his continued indecision about how to deal with Khrushchev, irrespective of his speech’s apparent clarity. The president had summoned to the Cabinet Room Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Thompson, and three former ambassadors to Moscow: Charles “Chip” Bohlen, who continued as the State Department’s resident Russia expert; George Kennan, Kennedy’s new ambassador to Yugoslavia; and Averell Harriman, whom Kennedy had made “ambassador at large.”

  The days leading up to the session had produced a flurry of preparatory cables and meetings. Thompson had been busiest of all, sending in a series of long telegrams designed to educate the new president and his administration on all aspects of his greatest foreign policy challenge. Kennedy had decided to keep Thompson on as ambassador, in large part due to his unique access to Khrushchev. This was his first trip to Washington, D.C., since that decision had been made. Thompson was delighted to serve a president who not only was a fellow Democrat but had already demonstrated he would read his cables far more closely than Eisenhower had ever done.

  At age fifty-six, Thompson lacked the charm of his predecessor Bohlen and the brilliance of Kennan. But no one doubted his knowledge or pedigree. He had won the U.S. Medal of Freedom and had endeared himself to the Soviets for remaining in Moscow as a U.S. diplomat during the most gruesome days of the Nazi siege after the American ambassador had fled.

  Thompson had been at the table in the postwar years for almost every important negotiation concerning the Soviets, from Potsdam in July 1945 through talks over Austria’s independence in 1954 and 1955. He was known for his steady hand, whether at poker with embassy personnel or at geopolitical chess with the Soviets. Thompson argued it was time for Kennedy to decide “our basic policy toward the Soviet Union.”

  Privately, Thompson had been critical of Eisenhower’s failure to pick up on the post-Stalin efforts to ease Cold War tensions. He agreed with Khrushchev’s view that his efforts to reduce tensions had gone unrewarded. Thompson had cabled home in March 1959, “We have refused these overtures or made their acceptance subject to conditions he as a Communist considers impossible.” Explaining Khrushchev’s decision to launch the Berlin Crisis in late 1958, Thompson said, “We are in the process of rearming Germany and strengthening our bases surrounding Soviet territory. Our proposals for settling the German problem would in his opinion end in dissolution of the Communist bloc and threaten the regime in the Soviet Union itself.”

  In the days ahead of the February 11 meeting, Thompson was careful to provide a more nuanced and complex understanding of Khrushchev than he had done ahead of Kennedy’s State of the Union. He considered Khrushchev the least doctrinaire and best of all possible Soviet leadership alternatives. “He is the most pragmatic of the lot and is tending to make his country more normal,” wrote Thompson in the sparse language of the diplomatic cable. Pointing to Khrushchev’s Kremlin opposition, Thompson warned that the Soviet leader could disappear within Kennedy’s term “from natural or other causes.”

  Regarding Berlin, Thompson cabled that the Soviets cared more about the German problem as a whole than they did about the fate of the divided city. Thompson said Khrushchev wanted above all to stabilize communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe, “particularly East Germany, which is probably the most vulnerable.” He said the Soviets were “deeply concerned with German military potential and fear West Germany will eventually take action, which will face them with the choice between world war and retreat from East Germany.”

  Thompson conceded that no one could predict with any accuracy Khrushchev’s intentions regarding Berlin, but it was Thompson’s best judgment that the Soviet leader would try to settle the problem during 1961 due to increased pressure from the Ulbricht regime, which felt endangered by Berlin’s increased use as an escape route for refugees and as a base for Western spy and propaganda activities. Thompson said Khrushchev would be influenced on Berlin by other issues, ranging from what sorts of trade incentives Kennedy offered to the extent of domestic pressures on him. Thompson said Khrushchev “would be disposed not to bring matters to a head” on Berlin before German elections in September if Kennedy could give him some hope that real progress could be made thereafter.

  In one cable after another, Thompson tried to provide a crash tutorial for the new administration on how to handle the Soviets regarding Berlin. He was also in competition with other voices, who were prescribing tougher measures against Moscow. Walter Dowling, the U.S. ambassador to West Germany, cabled from Bonn that Kennedy had to be sufficiently tough with the Soviets so that Khrushchev would see there was “no painless way for him to undermine the Western position in Berlin,” and that any attempt to do so held as many dangers for Moscow as it did for Washington.

  In Moscow, however, Thompson was arguing that the Kennedy administration had to devise better nonmilitary methods to fight communism. He said the president had to ensure that the U.S. system worked well, had to be certain the Western alliance’s member states remained united, and through deeds needed to demonstrate to the developing world and newly independent former colonies that the future belonged to the U.S. and not the USSR. He worried about U.S. mistakes in Latin America at a time when the Chinese challenge was forcing the Soviets to rejuvenate their “revolutionary posture.”

  “I am sure we would err if we should treat the Communist threat at this time as being primarily of a military nature,” he wrote in a cable that got particular traction in Washington. “I believe the Soviet leadership has long ago correctly appraised the meaning of atomic military power. They recognized major war is no longer an acceptable means of achieving their objectives. We shall, of course, have to keep our powder dry and have plenty of it, for obvious reasons.”

  As if to counterbalance Thompson, Kennedy announced on February 9 that he was bringing out of retirement Harry Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, a hard-liner who was convinced from years of experience that one could counter the Kremlin only with a policy of strength. At Kennedy’s behest, one of America’s best-known hawks would lead the a
dministration studies on Berlin, NATO, and the related issues of balancing conventional versus nuclear weapons in any future military contingencies with the Soviets. Though Acheson would not join the meeting convened two days after his appointment, he would soon provide the antidote to Thompson’s more accommodating stance.

  The February 11 meeting would become typical of how the new president would reach decisions. He would bring together the top minds on an issue and then let them fire off sparks while he provoked them with probing questions. In making sense of it later in a top-secret account titled “The Thinking of the Soviet Leadership,” Bundy organized the subjects under four headings: (1) the general condition of the Soviet Union and its leadership; (2) Soviet attitudes toward the U.S.; (3) useful American policies and attitudes; and finally and most important, (4) how best Kennedy could enter negotiations with Khrushchev.

  Bohlen was surprised to discover that Kennedy, after having spoken so stridently in his State of the Union, possessed so few prejudices about the Soviet Union. “I’ve never heard of a president who wanted to know so much,” said Bohlen. Kennedy had little interest in the arcane subtleties of Soviet doctrine but instead wanted practical advice. “He saw Russia as a great and powerful country and we were a great and powerful country, and it seemed to him there must be some basis upon which the two countries could live without blowing each other up.”

  The men arrayed before him differed fundamentally in their views about Moscow. Bohlen worried that Kennedy underestimated Khrushchev’s determination to expand world communism. Kennan had doubts about whether Khrushchev was really in charge. He said the Soviet leader confronted “considerable opposition” from Stalinist remnants who opposed negotiation with the West, and thus Kennedy needed to deal with the “collective.” Thompson argued that although the government was a collective enterprise, it was increasingly one of Khrushchev’s making. He thought only grave failures in foreign affairs or agricultural production could threaten Khrushchev’s political control. There he saw problems, as Khrushchev could be facing a third successive year of bad harvests.